What the hell is going on with the item highlighting? 2 different kinds of highlighting and faulty graphics at the same time.
Not to mention that I had to increase the size of my Item Hangar and Ship Hangar window by about 100 pixel each because there is so much god damn wasted space between the icons. Compact mode doesn’t fix that either. All CM does is remove ABSOLUTELY ALL UI manipulation features from the UI while it leaves the padding between icons the same. I gained a whopping 10 pixel width-wise after enabling compact mode. WOHOO!
It does look neat and new and shiny, but the windows (even minimized) are too big, covering up things that were previously viewable. All of it just takes up too much space on-screen.
Also, I generally hate the minimizing/shrinking scroll/slider button on the right side of windows that changes size when the mouse hovers over it. Just leave it one size that doesn’t shrink/hide.
More instances of Window names cutting off for no reason whatsoever. Not even expanding one of the side cards to give the text even more space fixes the text cut off.
Besides, why are the icons to expand the side cards not adhering to the typical UI button design philosophy? They should be rectangular with the bottom right/left corner cut off. They should not have rounded corners.
This UI was marketed as a fix to all the UI inconsistencies of the old UI, yet it introduces new inconsistencies even before it’s fully released.
Thank you for letting me opt out. The additional clicks just to close the planetary industry view was annoying. The old interface with a simple x in the top right corner is so much better.
How much the photon ui encourages a warp to the customs office is worrisome when all I want to do is export stuff from the planet.
I hope I never have to put up with the photon UI.
Some feedback. General feeling when logging in: “How did my UI get bugged/screwed”. Details:
Largely same problems as with the “improved” character/skill window some time ago. I guess the feedback then did nothing. Screen estate is used for fancy borders and whatnot, not for actually important things. Meaning less information can be fitted on the screen.
Neocom resize doesnt work
The UI looks like it’s made for a smartphone. In the 1990s. This is a PC game in 2020s.
Dropping by to drop feedback on why I disabled Photon UI. I am, FYI, playing at 200% UI scaling on a 4k screen.
So. Much. Wasted. Space. The outliner needs to be much larger than it previously was to show the same amount of info, for example.
Colours. Where’d my yellow Undock button go? Why is everything suddenly tinted blue? This is pretty hard on the eyes compared to the previous neutral blend.
Waste of space again - buttons seem far larger than needed in almost all cases.
Notifications are far, far, FAR less noticeable. No longer flashing or having a little red indicator really makes them ignorable (they were only orange-highlighted on my end, which… is even less visible near Amarr space).
The button icons were sleeked over far too hard. Lock on/acquire target, for instance, used to be a definite crosshair; now it’s a dot sight and it took me a second to locate it. Same for the Jump button, it was previously rather clearly going through a hole/gate, now it’s… a skip button?
All in all, I see what was attempted - give a clean, sleek, new look. However, I feel like the UX team forgot the primary desirable factor of EVE UI: its raw, nigh-uncompromising utility. I won’t be using Photon UI until it at least becomes on par with the previous UI regarding all the problems I have with it (see above).
You can have that and don’t waste all that space. A clean, modern, sleek UI doesn’t need to have bloat. Quite the opposite, it should have no bloat.
All they need to do is remove the ridiculous padding, the useless and counterproductive shadows, the wasted space and keep UI features where they are supposed to be and don’t hide them behind CM’s 3 dots just because the UI developers are not good enough to code. The old UI is more compact and more informative than the new UI’s compact mode, let alone the default UI.
Just to add a little positive feedback, I do appreciate leaving the option to opt-out. Unfortunately the Photon UI is just so horrible that it’s hard to give any pro points about it. Just feels like a total waste of dev-time. If your are trying to give us better performance (no objections for that!) try to match the functionality / non-space-wasting style of the old ui, and change things on the background. Don’t fix what is not broken.
I spent 1 hour with Photon AGAIN and while some issues were fixed other issues and a range of new issues were introduced. This UI is not in Beta, it is not even in Alpha state.
It’s bad, it makes playing the game harder, it hides information under the guise of “reducing information density”, it’s bloated for no good reason and reduces usable screen real estate by a big margin, the compact mode is largely a joke because it’s less compact than the existing UI’s uncompacted UI. The UI changes at a pace that makes even snails wonder if it moves at all, while most if not all the bug reports and criticism from weeks and months ago are till plaguing the UI, which puts into question how much CCP cares about this new UI at all.
Moreover, if you disable Photon, you have to un-screw-up your old UI because settings carry over. My Hangar windows were in compact mode in the old UI after I switched back from Photon. So, CCP still cannot sanitize between setting states even though they require us to quit the game to turn off Photon.
Whilst in ge=neral not against the new UI, there is one thing that means I am opting out. When you have a location (Bookmark) tab floating in th eUI, new bookmarks are not appearing unless there is a session change at least … … in any case not consistent .
The major reason to opt out is that this new UI looks more appropriate for a mobile phone game or for a toddler-oriented tablet game. The whole idea of creating a single “unified” UI for every platform imaginable seems to be hardly (if ever) achievable for EVE in particular, which is being reflected by today’s update:
Wasted screen space. Old style UI - light, sleek, stylish and extremely informative, while new one is overloaded with huge control icons and fluff elements which take way too much space. Examples:
new Wallet window of same size as “old” one has 3/4 of space taken by all the controls & buttons as opposed to “old” one where roughly same 3/4 were taken by actual data we are after, partially due to the fact that vertical “Overview/Transactions/etc” menu on the left in Photon is moved into a horisontal one on top;
bloated drone window with all new fluff takes like 2-3 times more space then it really should.
Fancy window borders are annoying & hurt my eyes.
Fonts are way too massive.
While most control buttons became way bigger, it took me a while to locate “Recover Active Probes” one in Probe Scanner window… Why would someone move one of the most used ones from where it was to the bottom right & made it not just small but VERY small?
Why CCP changes shortcuts between UI’s? “L” in “classic” - local bookmarks (which is handy & convenient) while in Photon it’s a general BM locations shortcut. I hardly ever visit a general locations folder, while hit that “L” key nearly every second system I visit… Classic UI is a winner again.
Overview icons (Align/Jump/Warp to etc.) are ugly & inconvenient to use
In conclusion: being so far a loyal EVE fan, I rather prefer to play a PC game on my PC and not some multy-platform cross-breed hurting my eyes… There are way too much of this annoying fluff in the game already (Agency, Character Sheet etc.) and adding this Photon as a mandatory bloated “feature” without opting out could be way too much for me.
I just wanna say thank you for being so restraint. I tried and failed. But I wrote the same the feeling I got is that person who made decision isn’t even playing the game.
I have only had a few minutes to play since the update so my mind may change and it may grow on me.
I agree with the information density mentioned above. I had to more than double the size of my drone window to get the same information I always had with the addition of the little picture of the drone.
Also this is more a matter of just needing to get used to it, but for many, many years I have been looking for the same icons to do the same things. Now they are just different enough to make me less efficient, at least for now. Not a bug deal for mining and missioning maybe but a much bigger deal for hunting.
I do think the new interface looks great, but it is better suited to a less complex game that requires less information. If there is a way to preserve the intent and integrity of it while making everything smaller that would solve the problem I am seeing.
I am starting to get the impression the devs making this new UI are not even reading these feedback posts, rather some one is cherry picking only the positive comments for them.
Right from the start you have been told all these same problems over and over and yet the header bars are still massive, you need to go back to formula and re make the whole window design keeping the buttons in the same place, use the same amount (or even less) space and keep header bars the same size as the current/old UI.
